Drive management in Ubuntu 8.10

I migrated my PC from a Windows XP system to Intrepid Ibex. During the install, I intentionally reformatted my entire primary IDE drive to ext3. Looking at /etc/fstab, I have a root partition in /dev/sda1, and a swap area in /dev/sda5.
Puzzlement begins: It's an IDE drive , not SCSI. Why is it here, and what happened to my expected hd0 or hda0?
Puzzlement continues: I also have another (unused) empty internal IDE drive which as originally formatted under Windows XP as NTFS. Under "Places" I can see it , listed by its old volume name, and I can mount it, and see that it's empty, except for a Volume ID and a "RECYCLER" bin.
But where is it? under /dev I did a "ls sd*" and saw /dev sees a sda, sda1, sda2, sda5, sdb, sdb2, and sdb5. But /etc/fstab also recognizes a scd0 which it mounts at /media/cdrom0 and identifies as an iso9660 device.
Of course the CDROM stuff makes sense. Yet I'd like to know where my "missing" IDE drive 1 went and how I can follow it in he system tables.
The reason I'' asking this is that eventually I'd like tro reformat the device as an ext3 filesystem also. I'd like to use that device to support a journaled MySQL data base for further development work.
Can anyone help me figure this out?
-Rich B.

The first thing I'd do, is check: "sudo fdisk -l" to list your devices. This should give you an indication of the device names that Ubuntu assigned them.
You can then type "mount" (with no options) to show all of the file systems currently mounted on your system, and where they are mounted to.
I can't answer why your IDE drive is being assigned an sdx device name, but I can tell you that my SATA drive (not SCSI) is indicated as sdx as well.
Hopefully this helps, and if not let me know and we can keep digging.
Thanks,
Jason

In Ubuntu, hard drives are mounted as "sda/b/a/...etc" instead of "hda/b/c/..etc". See this Ubuntuforums article: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=582199To get greater visibility on the hard drives in your system, I'd suggest that you install "gparted", which is a graphical utility for managing hard drives. Just enter sudo apt-get install gparted in the terminal to install (Internet connection req'd). After GParted is installed, you can launch it from System>Administration>GParted
After you launch GParted, if you have multiple hard drives installed, they will be accessible via the selection control on the upper r/h side of the GParted GUI.
Good luck!
Shannon VanWagner
humans enabled

Copyright 1998-2015 Ziff Davis, LLC (Toolbox.com). All rights reserved. All product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Toolbox.com is not
affiliated with or endorsed by any company listed at this site.